CUR - The Council on Undergraduate Research

Supplementing Traditional Musculoskeletal Anatomy Pedagogy with Brief, Focused Yoga Sessions

Sudhee Acharya, Catherine Colpoys, Nicole Jones, Emily Wright, & Dr. Kimberly Szucs, Department of Occupational Therapy, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15282

The purpose of this study is to determine the potential benefits of practicing body region-specific yoga sequences as an additional teaching modality, in conjunction with cadaver dissection and computer aided instruction, to stimulate students’ understanding of the human anatomy. While the traditional gold-standard method of learning anatomy is through cadaver dissection, students can also benefit from an active and intrinsic experience provided by yoga to promote a multimodal learning approach. Researchers hand-picked body region-specific yoga sequences that aligned with the anatomy curriculum to be completed by volunteer-based participants of an undergraduate anatomy course. The expectations of the participants are two-fold. Students were encouraged to practice weekly yoga videos, which included several poses that aligned with recently learned anatomical regions. While completing videos, students were also given handouts which outlined muscular sensations experienced through specified poses from the videos. Upon completion and review of the yoga video and handout, students were given a qualitative reflection. This reflection fostered higher level thinking in order to bridge the gap between the curriculum material and the poses within the yoga videos. This supplemental teaching modality is expected to promote long-term retention of anatomical concepts for application of the knowledge in future coursework and practice. 

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